reply to post by halfoldman
Not only Uganda proves gays need a state. Consider the sad case of the gay Palestinians:
"For gay Palestinians who feel persecuted at home, the obvious escape route is to Israel, but because of the political conflict this can be fraught
with difficulties. As far as most Palestinians are concerned, fleeing into Israel is a betrayal of their cause, while gay men who remain in the
Palestinian territories also come under suspicion.
‘In the West Bank and Gaza, it is common knowledge that if you are homosexual you are necessarily a collaborator with Israel,’ said Shaul Gonen,
of the Israeli Society for the Protection of Personal Rights (‘“Death Threat” to Palestinian Gays’, BBC, 3 March 2003). Bassim Eid, of the
Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, explained:
In the Arab mindset, a person who has committed a moral offence is often assumed to be guilty of others, and it radiates out to the family and
community. As homosexuality is seen as a crime against nature, it is not hard to link it to collaboration – a crime against nation (‘Palestinian
Gay Runaways Survive on Israeli Streets’, Reuters, 17 September 2003).
Regarding gay men as politically treacherous is not unique to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. There are parallels here with Britain in the 1950s
and 1960s, when gay men engaged in secret government work were treated as a particular security risk. In the popular imagination, this may well have
been seen as an intrinsic part of their psychological make-up, although the fact that their sexual activities were illegal did expose them to the
possibility of blackmail by Soviet agents.
Equating homosexuality with collaboration makes it extremely dangerous for Palestinians to return home after fleeing to Israel. One man told Halevi in
the New Republic of a friend in the Palestinian police who ran away to Tel Aviv but later went back to Nablus, where he was arrested and accused of
being a collaborator:
They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him
food and water until he died in that hole.
There is little doubt that some – though by no means all – gay Palestinians are forced by their precarious existence to work for Israeli
intelligence in exchange for money or administrative favours such as the right of residence; both Eid and Gonen said they knew of several. Others,
meanwhile, are coerced into undercover work for the Palestinian authorities; one 19-year-old runaway stated in an interview with Israeli television
that he had been pressurized by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to become a suicide bomber in order to ‘purge his moral guilt’, though he had refused
(‘Palestinian Gay Runaways’, Reuters, 17 September 2003)."
gaymiddleeast.blogspot.com...
How I wish I could take all transexual lesbi-gay out of there to safety.